As it prepared to issue its new rule on water regulation, the Environmental Protection Agency faced a great deal of public concern and resistance from landowners and farmers. Given recent and aggressive EPA actions against landowners, there were fears that the rule would dramatically expand EPA jurisdiction over every ditch and gully in America capable of holding a mud puddle.

To mollify critics, the EPA invited public comments, as agencies must do in the regulatory process. Later, its administrator, Gina McCarthy, would boast that it received nearly 1 million comments on the rule — nearly 90 percent of which were in favor.

…What McCarthy did not mention, and what was reported last week in the The New York Times, is that the EPA used government resources to coordinate with environmentalist groups in order to achieve this 90 percent support. Through an intense effort in what is known as “grassroots lobbying,” the government worked to encourage people on one side of the debate to make their voices heard, so as to skew perceptions of public opinion.

In addition to meeting behind closed doors with environmentalist leaders supportive of the rule, the agency used a social media tool called Thunderclap. It is like Kickstarter, but users donate social media shares instead of money. By getting just under 1,000 left-wing activists to sign on, the EPA was able to urge 1.8 million people in their political circles, all at once, to comment favorably on the proposed rule.

The EPA doesn’t care about public opinion, they just want to create the illusion of caring, so that citizens don’t feel completely steamrolled by the new rules.

Aren’t there laws against federal agencies lobbying for themselves? The EPA used taxpayer dollars to coordinate with left wing groups to create a PR campaign that reverse engineered demand for a rule they planned to issue all along. It’s propaganda in the first degree, and it sets a terrifying precedent for other un-elected agency bureaucrats to manipulate the truth in order to advance their latest “great idea.”

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